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Re: [ox-en] No more money trickery propaganda please



Very strong expression, Stefan, and I wonder if your view is really shared
by many in this list. I for my part could live with a peaceful agreement
to accept that some people in here think that monetary patterns are an
important part of peer production why others dont. There is a fundamental
division in interest, and we have to deal with it. But not in denying each
other respect, I really hate this tone.

I myself had just one hour ago a very moving conversation with Genevieve
Vaughan here in Vienna and it was really interesting to talk to this lady
about the logic of gift versus the logic of market. I understood now much
better that we are on the track of something substantial here, which goes
far beyond our understanding of what usually is talked about as gift
economy so far. I presented Oekonux to her and said we are not really that
fond of the idea of mothering or maternal heritage as paradigm or the
traditional indigenous cultures with their giving celebrations. as a role
model for a future society.

But, in fact, she said that the issue is much much deeper than that, the
market relation being simply not only a product of scarcity but also a
very primordial creator of scarcity. Free economy and (equivalent)
exchange economy are opposed in principle, and an economy based on
unilateral action is by far more productive than a monetary or
equivalent-exchange economy.

In a market relation, the exchange terminates the positive interest of
both parties in the material effect of their production; whilst in the
"unilateral action" economy, the transfer of "value" from one person to
the other creates a "syllogism" of its own, a self multiplying structure
of enabling and empowerment. If we bring it to this abstract level, we
could find the parallel between the gift economy and the
selbstentfaltung-structure that the Stefans try to explain.

There is focus on enacting social relation, a positive interest in the
unfolding of the party that I support and a transitive relation. If I (A)
do something for B, then B does something for C, it really is "A->C". 

Genevieve thinks that we have to to reject the whole theoretical construct
that the world of Free Software is an issue of reputation economy ( a
hiiden exchange of effort versus attention or reputation). Actually it was
the first time I heard a feminist theorist talk positively about the Logic
of Free Software. She said that the Logic of Free Software corrsponded
with the gift logic in a very abstract way, by simply enacting "empowering
transitive unilateral social acts". 

She also critizised a lot of linguistic theories from Chomsky to
Wittgenstein and Umberto Eco, for disregarding the very basic nature of
language. "While Chomsky thinks language is coming from somewhere deepla
inside the brain, Eco thinks its simply a tool for lying". In fact she
said, language is the archetype of a gift economy. "We dont loose words if
we give them away. We keep them alive and refine them that way. That is
the root of linguistic creativity and not any generative apparatus deep
inside. Thus language is the lead paradigm of a gift economy".

I googled and found she had written about that subject, maybe for deeper
reading one could turn to this:
http://www.gift-economy.com/articlesAndEssays/languageAsGift.html

So with all this in mind, maybe we really can fork here and declare that
the Oekonux list is somewhat dedicated to the functioning of an economy
based on unilateral transitive productions of common informational or
information-based infrastructures and their effects on the economy as a
whole. I can understand Stefans frustration about the list filling up with
more and more sophisticated exchange-based schemes and totally loosing
focus. But that does not dequalify the question of experimenting with
alternative monetary exchange schemes at all; they must also be tried out.
We must allow for different patterns to be tested in reality, and we must
not engage in meaningless wars of belief.

Franz

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Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
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